Betomania has befallen Washington elites: Democratic pundits, political operatives and influencers are having a collective swoon over Democratic representative Beto O’Rourke. He is fresh off a failed Senate run, where he generated internet fame for his skateboarding, musicianship and sunny disposition. Now, he is Washington’s version of Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan, only the screaming teeny-boppers are Beltway politicos: one rainmaker touted him as “Obama, but white”, a Wall Street-funded group called Third Way declared that “we are big Beto fans” and a former Obama aide penned an entire love letter touting O’Rourke 2020, without even once mentioning where the Texas congressman stands on a single legislative issue.
Perhaps the fuzziness around O’Rourke’s political positions isn’t a mistake. Maybe it is designed to obscure facts about his record that may prove to be inconvenient in a Democratic primary. After all, this is a lawmaker who abruptly backed off unequivocally supporting Medicare for All, aligned himself with the party’s Wall Street faction, voted to gut financial regulations, supported Republican-crafted tax cuts, boosted the fossil fuel industry – and then broke his own pledge to reject donations from oil and gas executives.
[bold]A liberal heartthrob who votes with Republicans[/bold]
The 46-year-old O’Rourke has racked up a voting record helping Republicans ram parts of their agenda through the Congress. In an era of growing economic inequality, O’Rourke has split with the majority of his party to vote for Republican initiatives to weaken Wall Street regulations and accelerate bank mergers – and he once voted for a Republican bill that Democratic legislators said was designed to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s from combatting racially discriminatory lending. He also voted for a key part of Donald Trump’s so-called deportation force.
Meanwhile, despite the imminent climate catastrophe facing our planet, O’Rourke has often taken the side of carbon polluters. He has repeatedly voted to help the fossil fuel industry increase its exports. He even helped the GOP defeat a Democratic measure designed to limit the possibility of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. (For more, click here to read a story I wrote this week about Beto’s voting record.)
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[bold]Why another Obama would be a tragedy[/bold]
Replicating an Obama presidency would be better than what we have now. But it would still be a tragedy. That’s because the fundamental premise of Obamaism - and its predecessor, Clintonism – is that there is always a policy that can at once serve the people and the powerful. And recent history has showed that is both false and dangerous.
The fantastical mythology of a satisfactory “third way” between the corporate class and the rest of us posits that the Democratic party’s insurance industry backers can be enriched and healthcare policy can still be humane; its Wall Street sponsors can eviscerate industries and workers can still earn enough to survive; and its fossil fuel donors can keep pumping out carbon and the ecosystem can still sustain human life.
The alluring idea is that we never actually have to answer that haunting question of labor lore: “Which side are you on?” Obamaism leads us to believe that we do not need to choose, and that we can actually have it all – as long as we always make sure to line up behind policies that appease the super-wealthy.
It is, in other words, the ideology undergirding the argument recently put forward by former vice-president, Joe Biden, who insisted: “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble … the folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
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